Sorry for the hiatus in writing, but things sped up around here and now I’m writing from Fort Leonard Wood and my new duty station.  Last time I left off I foreshadowed range week which on the surface sounds like a ton of fun. 

After checking out our weapons we went out to a 25 meter range to zero in our weapons.  Zeroing consists of getting a tight shot group (5 shots in a 4 inch diameter) at 25 meters in the prone position.  Once you do that, we adjust the sights up or down to get it centered on a target.  You shoot 5 shots, and then go and check your target and readjust…in theory.  I was one of the first groups to zero and got done in about 25 minutes without having to keep going back and forth since my shot group was tight from the beginning.  For others though, some were zeroing for 8 hours and the rest of us were waiting around until they brought out more food for us.  It was dark when we had to patrol the area for brass and clean up (we got out there around 10am).

The next day we drove to the manual pop up target range.  Because of weapons maintenance and the time we got back (11:45 pm), most of us got around 6 hours of sleep.  The other platoon got to shoot first and we had to man the targets.  There is a big hill that we get behind and there are very large targets that we lift up with a rig or lower after they shoot/ hit it 5 times.  They can shoot from 100, 200, and 300 meters (I forgot to mention that we never got a scope, everything we did was open sight for those of us who qualified this week).  After 3 full sets of 5 and starting the 4^thset, the range went cold and over the radio it was announced that one of the 1LT’s shot herself.  Everyone immediately thought it was a joke as we couldn’t see over the hill, but as trucks sped around picking up our cadre and an ambulance and range patrol showed up, we found out it was more real.  While that went on, a group of about 7 of us decided to PT on our own until we were called over.

Essentially, the girl was in the prone and transitioning into the kneeling position when she took her weapon on safe, and grabbed it by the trigger with it pointing at her big toe.  The rest was history-  6 hours of sleep + 8 hours of trying to zero in the day before + road march that morning = no toe!  After she was carted off, we got another hour instructions on putting the weapon on safe and on safe (which we then had to practice for about 30 minutes…needless to say we weren’t happy).  After that, we resumed firing and when we got our turn, so much time had passed that we shot about half the rounds the other platoon did and only from 200-300 (we mark each series of 5 on the targets with very large  off color circles so they can see.  We were going to try our IR lasers at night but too much time had gone by, so we went back to the barracks around 6 pm and had to do weapons maintenance that night.